


Only As Old As You Feel

by Sholio



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Old Age, Retirement
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-07
Updated: 2019-09-07
Packaged: 2020-09-26 20:35:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20395765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: RobinlovesHawkins Care Home. It's so bright and sunny, and everyone is so friendly. Surely there's nothing at all weird going on here, no matter what her roommate Nancy says.





	Only As Old As You Feel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aroberuka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aroberuka/gifts).

> For the absolutely _wonderful_ "Weird Adventures While Living Together In A Retirement Home AU" request.

Hawkins Care Home is a pretty nice place, Robin thinks. It's bright and sunny and cheerful. There are lots of enrichment activities, and the independent residents, like Robin, are mostly left alone in their little apartment-style rooms. She likes her roommate, Nancy.

Though Nancy does have some odd ideas.

Nancy was a reporter for forty years, and Robin is pretty sure that's why Nancy seems to have latched onto the idea of looking for mysteries everywhere, even in a perfectly normal retirement home. For example, Nancy seems to think there are more deaths than there should be for a place this size. She asks Robin about it, very quietly, during bingo.

"Well, people here are old," Robin says, perfectly reasonably.

"Yes, but we had three people die just this weekend," Nancy whispers back, eyes darting all around as if she thinks someone is going to sneak up on them and stop the conversation somehow. "No wait, I forgot Mr. Melvald. Make that four."

"Mr. Melvald had his 101st birthday last month. I don't think it's peculiar if his heart finally gave out."

"Listen," Nancy whispers. "Night is when things tend to happen around here. You need to stop taking the drugs they give us in the evening."

"... you mean the sleeping pills? To help us sleep? And my heart medication?"

"Shhhh. They're onto us."

_Who's 'they'?_ Robin wants to ask, following Nancy's gaze to a little cluster of residence staff talking by the doorway. It's just the contagion of Nancy's paranoia, she reassures herself, that makes it seem as if they're looking at her and Nancy specifically.

"Bingo!" Nancy calls, hopping up, and when Robin looks around she's rotated off to sit at another table. Robin sits there feeling lonely and uncomfortable.

She doesn't believe Nancy's wild theories, she really doesn't, but that night when a cheerful, friendly nurse brings around the little nightly cups of pills, Robin finds herself staring into the cup for a little while before she finally tosses them back.

*

Before too long, she's staring nervously at the nursing staff, noting just how _many_ of the doors are blank with their deceased residents' things taken down, and wondering if there are secret messages in the Scrabble tiles in the games room. She even goes so far as to flush her pills down the toilet one night. All that happens is that she lies awake, tossing and turning, like she always used to back home; she's slept better since she got here than she ever did before. And in the morning she's having heart palpitations, so yeah, skipping the evening meds is a bad idea.

But she does have a lot of bad dreams here. Weird dreams.

... okay, she needs to make more friends. Friends who aren't paranoid.

And preferably not the guy who keeps spilling things on her in the lunch line. The first time he does it, she thinks it's some kind of weird attempt to hit on her, but pretty soon she's convinced that no, he really _is_ that clumsy. He uses a walker, and his attempts to handle the tray and the walker at the same time have resulted in Robin wearing his lunch more than once.

"Okay, this is too much," she snaps after he turns around too fast after picking up his tray and nearly pours Meatloaf Surprise down her skirt. "Give me that."

She carries both their trays over to a table, while he thanks her profusely. "You know," she says, setting them down, "you can have the staff carry your tray for you."

"I know, but that lady says ..." He looks wildly around and leans close to whisper. "... _they're trying to poison our food."_

Oh God, Robin thinks. She looks where he's looking and is unsurprised to see Nancy in consultation with a small group of other residents.

"You need to stop frightening the feebleminded," she tells Nancy later in their room. "You've got some old guy in the lunch room convinced that someone's going to poison him."

"Is that Steve?" Nancy says, who somehow has managed to get on a first-name basis with most of the other residents while stealthily passing out handmade flyers saying things like _Do you know someone who's missing? Come to Rm. 212 and put them on the list!_ "That is not what I told him. Maybe he's been talking to Murray in 302." She smiles. "I have good news, though. My grandkids are going to look around a little bit for us."

"If you get us kicked out of here, Wheeler, so help me ..."

*

Robin occasionally regrets not having kids, but she tends to regret it less when she's been around Nancy's grandkids, Mike and Holly. They're nice enough kids, but so _energetic._

Also, somehow she's having lunch with Steve most days now so she can carry his tray, at least on days when _his_ grandkids aren't there to do it for him. She can't keep track of them; there seem to be dozens of them.

"Oh no, I never had kids," Steve tells her when she asks him about it. "Not biologically. I took in fosters for a number of years. Those are _their_ kids. And, uh, some of the nurses' kids. And some of the kids who volunteer."

Steve has a way with kids, is what she's figuring out.

Other than that, he worked all his life at a used car dealership he inherited from his dad, and is in all ways a perfectly normal, ordinary person and a relaxing antidote to Nancy's particular brand of high-octane paranoia.

_HAS ANYONE SEEN BARBARA HOLLAND LATELY?_ are the latest flyers, which have been turning up everywhere. Barbara, Nancy has finally told Robin, was her first roommate, the one she had before Robin. Nancy and Barbara had been friends since middle school, seventy-plus years of friendship that ended when Barbara disappeared one night.

"They said she had a stroke," Nancy whispers during movie night. They're in the back, with _Casablanca_ playing on the big screen. "But I was right next to her. I didn't hear a thing. It's those _drugs,_ I'm telling you. And I never saw her again. Even her funeral was weird. It was a closed-casket ceremony and there were a bunch of strangers around, young men in dark suits that I've never seen before. I don't think any of them were her relatives --"

"Shhhh!" comes from several people around them.

"Oh, hush yourself!" Nancy hisses back.

"Robin! Hey!" The voice comes from near Robin's elbow, and she looks around to see Steve in the aisle, walker and all. "Hi there. Can I sit here?"

"Shush!" from behind them.

Robin shuffles over to make room for Steve. "You two know each other, right?"

"Yeah," Steve whispers. "You're Jonathan's friend. The lady with the flyers."

"Steve, Nancy. Nancy, Steve," Robin whispers. "Wait, who's Jonathan?"

"His grandson is my grandson's best friend," Nancy whispers back. "He used to be a photographer for the _Times._ He's still got a really nice camera. I'm going to have him help me take pictures of --"

"Shush!"

"Shush yourself!"

*

Robin has never liked to admit it to herself, but the thing she's always feared most, ever since she was a girl, is being old and alone. It's the main reason why she regrets not having kids, even though she didn't really _want_ kids, and it was her biggest fear when she left the condo where she'd lived for the last thirty years and moved into a shared room at an assisted-living facility.

And yet here she is at midnight, playing involuntary co-host to a room full of people. There's Nancy, of course, and Steve, and Nancy's friend Jonathan with his camera, and weird Murray from the third floor, and about a dozen grandkids and candystripers. Robin doesn't actually even _know_ most of these people, but the curly-haired kid is passing around a bag of candy and the entire room has that giggling-under-the-covers-at-night energy of sleepovers and late-night dorm parties, something Robin hasn't experienced since she was barely older than these kids.

"So we all know what we're going to do, right?" Nancy whispers. "Jonathan, you've got the camera. Will, you'll be on lookout duty. Max will be our go-between. I don't know how we're going to get into the basement --"

"I can pick locks," Murray whispers.

"Of _course_ you can. Steve --"

She hushes then, they all do, as brisk nurse footsteps pass in the hall. Nancy's right, Robin thinks; this place is _way_ more active at night than it should be. She's not sure if any of their wild speculation has any basis in fact (Russians! science experiments! monsters in the basement!) but _something_ weird is going on at Hawkins Care Home, and they're going to find out what.

She's heard people say life begins at forty or even at fifty, but Robin is pretty sure that for her, it might as well be eighty, because she can't _wait_ for this.


End file.
